Judging Arnold; bench appointments well timed

Last week’s Field Poll may have given Schwarzenegger’s 85 percent of the Republican vote in the November re-election bid, but that doesn’t mean the Terminator still isn’t trying to make nice to any GOP faithful who still may have their doubts about his party credentials.

Today, for example, the governor’s office announced that Jim Rogan and Laura Parsky have been selected for Southern California judgeships.

The big name here is Rogan, a 48-year-old former GOP congressman from Glendale who was a conservative poster boy even before he served as one of the managers — i.e., prosecutors — in the 1999 impeachment of Democratic President Bill Clinton. He paid a price for that support in 2000, when he lost his congressional seat to Democrat Adam Schiff.

Rogan, who grew up poor in San Francisco’s Mission District, already has spent time on the bench. From 1990 to 1994, when he was elected to the state Assembly, he was a Municipal Court judge in Glendale.

As a matter of fact, Schwarzenegger was so anxious to announce Rogan’s appointment that he didn’t even wait for the job to open. Judge Susanne Shaw isn’t slated to retire from her Orange County post until Sept. 30, a mere five weeks or so before the Nov. 7 election and long after the state GOP convention Aug. 18-20, where conservative party activists have skewered Schwarzenegger in the past for his picks for judgeships.

While the early announcement is unusual in judicial appointments, admitted Sabrina Lockhart, “it’s something we do sometimes when we know an opening is coming and we have a good candidate to fill it.”

Jon Fleischman, whose FlashReport is required reading for California conservatives, calls Rogan a GOP superstar and suggested that his appointment to the Orange County bench will go a long way toward appeasing Republicans who think Schwarzenegger has named way too many Democratic judges.

As for Parsky, her father is a GOP kingmaker in California with long-standing ties to President Bush. He’s currently a member of the UC Board of Regents and for years was a major power in the state Republican party.

Laura Parsky, 37, has been working for the Justice Department in Washington, D.C., in recent years, where she was a protege of Michael Chertoff, the former high-ranking Justice Department official who’s now head of Homeland Security.

The soon-to-be judge has been a regular on Capitol Hill, where as a deputy assistant attorney general she has been the government’s point person on such high-profile issues as cybercrime, electronic surveillance and other technology issues.

A graduate of Yale University with a law degree from UC Berkeley, Laura Parsky will become a Superior Court judge in San Diego County. She is registered as decline-to-state.